Khalid al-Falih, Saudi Arabia's oil minister, appeared relaxed. A long day of meetings was over and, taking the microphone at the press conference in Vienna on 30 November, he seemed keen to reassert the kingdom's command of the oil market. Saudi Arabia got what it came for in the Austrian capital at the end of November. But Russia's influence was plain. Opec agreed a nine-month extension to the cuts that would otherwise have expired in Q2 2018. It forced Libya and Nigeria to accept a cap on output. The revised deal starts from 1 January 2018 but keeps the cuts, spread across the group and its non-Opec partners, at 1.8m barrels a day. It secures Moscow's cooperation again, dispelling for another few months the doubts that had surfaced about Russia's commitment. But to reach that point, Opec also had to accept the Russian terms, and the detail is in the fine print.
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